Several years ago, Kenneth Bruce had a burden. He was coaching his kids’ soccer teams, and he was struck by how many Hispanics were playing on his teams and in the rest of the league.
So Bruce — pastor of Westwood Baptist Church in Alabaster — came back and told the leadership at his church that he felt like Westwood needed to start a ministry for Spanish speakers.
Rick Swing, the church’s executive pastor, said they began to pray, and through those prayers, God brought people across their paths who had helped plant Spanish congregations before.
One of those was Brian Harper, church planting strategist for the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions.
“We talked to him, and he knew a young man named Juan Aristizabal, and we interviewed him,” Swing said.
Confirmation
In the years before, Aristizabal had been using his vacations to go and serve with church plants in Iowa and Texas. And now he felt like God might be calling him to Alabama, and Swing and the others as Westwood agreed.
“We felt the strong desire that he was the right person, him and his family, to be at our church,” Swing said.
Then he spoke with Ben Hale, evangelism and missions pastor at Dawson Memorial Baptist Church in Birmingham, who shared about their residency program for Hispanic church planters.
“They wanted to invest financially and also through a development strategy where they had one of their church planter pastors help our pastor with a time of preparing and mentoring,” Swing said. “That was such a blessing and confirmation of God’s desire to plant a Westwood Hispanic church.”
After Aristizabal had spent a year in Dawson’s program serving alongside Joshua del Risco, pastor of Iglesia Bautista Vida Nueva in Fultondale, he began to start Bible studies in the Alabaster area.
“He started with one family, and that one family grew to two families and then three, and before you knew it, he had 15–20 people who would gather for Bible study,” Swing said.
Aristizabal said it “was the Lord of course, not us.”
They kept growing, and in August 2023, they launched Westwood en Español.
“We have been working hard, and the Lord has been so good to us,” Aristizabal said, noting that they have 70 or 80 in attendance on Sundays now. “We are so blessed to be here; it’s a beautiful community, and they want to know more about the Lord. We can tell the Lord is doing something here in the Alabaster area.”
Future plans
From this ministry, Westwood also launched an English as a Second Language program as an outreach to the community, as well as a Spanish as a Second Language program for Westwood members to learn Spanish.
Swing said they had 50 people in the SSL program this semester, and they will “continue that progress to learn Spanish so they can be useful in sharing the gospel with people in our county who speak Spanish.”
He said Westwood en Español also has plans to train pastors and multiply more congregations in the future.
“Westwood has been contacted by the North American Mission Board about possibly becoming a training site,” Swing said.
The Westwood and Westwood en Español congregations see themselves as partners in a mission to reach their community, something that was illustrated by their joint baptisms in the creek in Montevallo this year.
“It was a great picture of unity and joy and the fruit of our ministries,” Swing said.
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